A Chinese intelligence firm’s database on 2.4 million people—including some 50,000 Americans—was recently leaked, exposing it to researchers.

Per a Tuesday report in the Register, Fullbright University Vietnam researcher Chris Balding and Australian security researcher Robert Potter co-authored a recent paper on Beijing-based company Shenzhen Zhenhua Data Technology, whose data on millions was obtained by an Australian based firm called Internet 2.0. Balding wrote in a blog post that the leaked database was compiled from “a variety of sources [and] is technically complex using very advanced language, targeting, and classification tools.” The team argued that the data was gathered as a tool for Chinese intelligence, military, and security agencies for “information warfare and influence targeting” (i.e. exposing weaknesses of or ways to influence targeted persons or institutions). […]

Georgetown University Center for Security and Emerging Technology senior fellow Anna Puglisi, a former counter-intelligence official specializing on East Asia, told the Post the U.S. focuses on “what’s directly tied to what military or intelligence officer, the spy-on-spy stuff like what we had with the Soviet Union” when it comes to China. But she said Chinese intelligence officials have a more “holistic” approach to open-source intelligence and “things like LinkedIn, social media—this seems like an evolution of that methodology.”

Read the full article at Gizmodo.